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In Irish traditional music, as in most world music, tunes belong to a fixed number of tune types, each related to a specific dance style. The most common tune types are jigs, reels, slides and polkas.
The combination of melody and accompaniment is quite a recent development. Prior to the 20th century, Irish music was almost devoid of harmony. Songs and tunes were performed unaccompanied — by soloists, or sometimes by groups of players or singers in unison. The emphasis was always on the tune. The ‘interest’ in the music came from ornamentation, improvisation and a mysterious quality the Irish call lift, best translated as feel — a complex push and pull in the rhythmic structure.
As music moved out of the kitchens and living rooms into the concert hall and onto the radio, audience expectations changed and now we have become used to listening to a soloist with some sort of accompaniment. To many ears, music no longer sounds ‘complete’ unless it has a full band arrangement. It's not surprising that Irish music has moved with the times, and during the 20th century an Irish band culture emerged.
Céilidh bands, in the 1940s, imitated the line-up of jazz bands of the time (to some extent) with pianos, drum kits, saxophones, and stand-up bass as well as the more obvious flutes, accordions and fiddles. The musical accompaniment was usually a very simple oom-pah style along with fairly obvious major and minor chords. This provided good loud music for dancing, but also fought against many of the strong melodic and rhythmic subtleties of the traditional tunes.
In the late 1960s, a new generation of musicians started experimenting with a different way of performing Irish music. Bands such as Planxty (who have recently reformed) and The Bothy Band drew inspiration from pop, rock and American folk music and, significantly, from the traditional music of Eastern Europe, which already had a strong folk band tradition.
Irish folk bands during this period developed a more rhythmically complex accompaniment style using strummed instruments including the guitar and a variation of the Greek bouzouki, which soon became known as the Irish bouzouki. And the musicians left behind simple major and minor chord structures to use drones, modal chords (neither major or minor; using only the root and fifth without the third) and more complex suspended and augmented harmonies. By avoiding major or minor chords, this style of accompaniment was more sympathetic to traditional Irish melodies, which often drifted between the two. Guitars and bouzouki were often given alternate tunings that facilitated these types of chords like DADGAD.
Bands also started playing tunes much faster — often at a speed too quick to dance to — while retaining the traditions of elaborate ornamentation and rhythmic variation that had developed over centuries of slower solo playing to accompany dancers. The faster tunes demanded a new level of virtuosity from players.
This approach to the arrangement and instrumentation of traditional tunes has been so successful, in Ireland, that it has been adopted by musicians from many other cultures in recent decades. In particular, the DADGAD guitar/Irish bouzouki accompaniment style has become common in many parts of Europe including France, Spain, Scandinavia, Finland and the UK.
The young Australian band Trouble in the Kitchen sit squarely in the modern Irish band tradition. They take traditional tunes, often learnt at sessions, and arrange them in a contemporary style still sympathetic to the older, purely melodic, tradition. Like most folk bands in Ireland — where folk music is virtually synonymous with Irish traditional music — their repertoire is made up of fast-paced melodic dance music, peppered with a few slower-paced songs.
The band comprises a flute and a fiddle, which together carry the melody line, and a guitar and Irish bouzouki, which provide harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment. The bouzouki occasionally steps into a melodic role, providing the music with a softer texture. The band's guitarist, Kate Burke, uses DADGAD tuning rather than the more more common EADGBE guitar tuning.
